


The Kingdom of Heaven

by lasersforeyes



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 8x21, Hurt Castiel, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Profound Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-08
Updated: 2013-05-08
Packaged: 2017-12-10 18:43:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasersforeyes/pseuds/lasersforeyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SPOILERS FOR 8x21.<br/>In trying to save Castiel's life, Dean learns more about free will, angels, and the universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Kingdom of Heaven

**And behold a dream came to me, and visions fell down upon me, and I saw visions of chastisement, and a voice came bidding (me) to tell it to the sons of heaven, and reprimand them.**

**(The Book of Enoch)**

**And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.**

**(Revelations 21:1)**

~

_"You were there."_

_They stand above the city of dust, the city of a hundred thousand souls, like constellations thrown to the ground, shining in the dark earth. The swords of the Host flame like another sun, rising where one has set, and in every house where there is no sacrificial mark, they extinguish one of those tiny stars._

_One of the Host, a column of towering light, a galaxy unto itself, pauses amid the river of glory, like one still blue stone, and the wheels and gears of him clash and churn in distress. This is not just, he thinks. This is not right. Who has spoken to the Lord that they know this is what He commands?_

_The center of the angel is a nuclear brilliance - in centuries to come, men will waken from scientific sleep and attempt to sketch the intricate whorls and valences of its unfolding, refolding spheres. It pulses and thrums with the light which makes the angel himself, and spreads that heavenly energy in ever more-delicate tendrils through his torso, head, and limbs. Now, in the center of an Egyptian town, barely a muddy handspan of humble shelters, the center of the angel trembles softly as he blinks his many eyes in hesitation._

_The Blood of the Lamb._

_He cannot help but think that something has come down incorrectly in translation; that both human and angel are missing some basic link that would eradicate the need for this slaughter. Something digs through the angel's brain like a creature upheaving itself from long burial, and his faces frown._

_The angel spins with a graceful flare of wings and bears down into the trembling, dirty body of a young shepherd praying desperately for deliverance. The breathless, tear-stained prayers end abruptly, between one breath and the next, and the shepherd stands, dark eyes now still and deep, blazing like distant stars. He slaughters one of his sheep with one hand, and strides through the chaos of the streets, slamming his bloody palm onto naked doors._

~

"Cas, c'mon buddy...stay with me back there!"

Dean's foot is practically punching through the floorboard. God help any cops who take notice of him right now, he thinks. The speedometer needle trembles near 100, and the Impala vibrates around them like an airplane on takeoff.

"He's not healing!"

Sam is in the back seat, crouching awkwardly and trying to brace both himself and Castiel around Dean's hairpin curves. His voice rises with panic, and he shouts paradoxically, "Jesus, Dean, slow down or you're gonna kill all of us!"

"Whaddya mean, not healing? Why?"

Dean yells so that he doesn't have to hear the sound of Castiel's breathing - _breathing?_  - all liquid and gasping and irregular with pain.

"The Hell should I know?" Sam is clearly with him on the yelling thing. A glimpse in the rearview: Sam's hands, slick to the wrists with blood. Dean's heart lodges up somewhere beneath his Adam's apple and stays there, pounding like a hyperactive five-year-old with a toy drum.

"Goddammit! Cas,  _c'mon_!"

He stares into the dark like he can burn it away with his eyes and pretends his voice didn't break on that last word like it was the beginning crack that would spread through his whole self and shatter him into bits. His hands are going numb on the wheel and he starts to feel like he's floating an inch or two above his body.

"There's...there's this blue light coming out..." Sam chokes, and Dean goes cold and calm.

_Just find the nearest motel. Nearest motel. Just find the closest lit sign in the dark._

And somewhere else, floating in endless rhythm across the blank screen of his consciousness, he can't help but remember:

_The moment Castiel laid a hand on you in Hell he was lost._

_Too much heart._

~

"You're caught up on everything that's been going on? On the crap that your brethren have been doing to humanity all this time?"

Dean looked down his nose at the rumpled, grubby little man that housed the Scribe of God. A low-grade, but somehow satisfying anger simmered in his chest. This Metatron, he'd decided in short order, was no different than the rest of the winged, self-righteous, cowardly dicks that had been running him ragged for years. It was time for a little good old salt-of-the-earth moralizing.

But Metatron looked up at him from the clutter of his tiny kitchenette with a gaze that somehow dampened the fire in Dean's belly. Metatron's eyes weren't alien, like Cas'. They looked into Dean's with the slightly sorrowful weight of a very old man, someone who had seen ages worth of shit and yet was no closer to any ultimate truth than Dean himself.

"I don't know how much you know of me..." He began, ignoring Dean's snort of derision. "But before I became Metatron, the Voice of God, I was known as Enoch."

Dean frowned, something slowly clicking over in his brain. "Wait...Enoch...like...as in...Enochian?"

Metatron nodded.

"Yes. And I was human."

What remained of Dean's piss and vinegar dissolved right out of him, like he'd just been doused with cold water.

" _What?_ "

"I was called upon by God to witness." Metatron looked into the distance over Dean's shoulder, his eyes unfocused now, as though whatever memories he was recalling were playing on a projector screen just behind where Dean was standing.

"W-witness what?"

"The first sins of the angels."

Dean's brain floundered around a bit, and he felt as though he'd forgotten to study for the exam; hell, forgotten that he was even registered for the class. Good thing he never tried to go to college.

"Like...Lucifer's little swan-dive?" He blustered.

"No, this was before Lucifer fell. The first Fallen were those who looked down on humanity...and fell in love."

Dean's jaw stayed awkwardly half-open.

"It's true," Metatron said softly, now looking into Dean's eyes again. "The history of humans and angels has almost always been entwined, ever since humans evolved souls. When the Watchers of Earth descended to take human lovers, they changed the tide of both human and angel fate forever."

Dean opened and closed his mouth several times, but the question that was trying to ask itself couldn't find a handhold in his churning mind.

"So, therefore, most of you are part angel," Metatron continued, oblivious to or unheeding of Dean's philosophical struggles. "It was, in a way, the beginning of the end for God. Though He wouldn't truly start to leave until centuries later, after the death of the last divine messiah."

The Scribe of God filled a glass with water from the tap and took a sip, then held the glass up to the light for a moment as though it were a miraculous artifact.

"When I set down the record and punishment of those angels who dared to interfere with the evolution of humanity, before I was an angel myself, I began to realize that - as powerful and far-seeing as they are - angels are not... _cannot_  be the unchanging moral guideposts that humans want to believe they are. That, in many ways, they are less perfect than humans, because with all that power comes all that responsibility. You see? An angel isn't free to make the choices that a human being is, because our choices are so much more devastating. But then...in their own way, so are yours. And that's something you are all slowly coming to learn."

He turned away to set the glass down, giving Dean a second - intentionally or not - to get control over the slightly gobsmacked look on his face.

"So do you really intend on closing the doors of Hell?"

At last it was a question that Dean's brain seemed to be able to latch onto.

"It...seems like the thing to do, don't it?" He rasped.

Metatron bobbed his head slightly. "It's your choice. And that's what this has all been about. The choices your kind make. But you're going to have to weigh that choice." He shrugged, shifted his gaze back to the imaginary projector screen for a second, then leveled that gaze back onto Dean in a way that reminded him, finally and alarmingly, of Castiel, standing in the dark kitchen just after they'd first met. "Ask yourself: what's it going to take to do this...and what is the world going to be like after it's done?"

~

Motel 6 rises like a shining beacon out of the darkness of Route 34, so suddenly that Dean almost blows past it. It's only after a truly alarming U-turn that they rumble into the parking lot. Everything between Dean cutting the engine and laying Castiel's terrifyingly limp, bloody body out on one of the beds like a lab specimen is a bit of a blur.

The wound in Castiel's belly looks big enough to put a fist into, and Sam was right - that bluish light seeps around the gory edges, hinting at the blinding radiance that Dean's only glimpsed once or twice. It looks weak and fluttery right now, and it gleams in the slits beneath Castiel's dark lashes, too. Dean hears his own voice as though from across the room.

"Cas, look at me.  _Look at me._ " 

Firm, low, commanding. How isn't his voice shaking? How isn't  _he_  shaking? He feels like a robot version of himself, heavy and cold and precise.

There is blood all down the angel's chin. His white shirt is half red now, and beneath it, his belly rises and falls in odd jerking motions, like a motor trying to start. His lashes flicker and open with what looks like a painfully herculean effort. His lips part to show teeth stained red.

Dean's hands are dousing the wound in rubbing alcohol, pressing wads of bandage to the gaping edges, entirely independent of his higher brain function. Castiel's pain-dark blue eyes find his with that never-failing accuracy, and Dean stares into them like if he never blinks, he can hold Cas here in the land of the living by psychic willpower alone.

"I got you. Okay? I got you."

That's when the shaking starts. It starts in his stomach, rippling outward until even the fingers that are putting iron pressure on Castiel's wound are spasming, like he's having a seizure or something. His lips are numb and his face feels cold. His eyes don't leave Castiel's, and he doesn't blink, even though they're burning.

"S-Sam."

It comes out so raw and guttural that Sam is there in an instant, wordlessly putting his hands over Dean's to help. Dean's shaking so hard now that the bed, Sam's hands, Castiel's body, are all vibrating.

"Cas," Sam says softly, and Castiel grunts a weak sound that might be Sam's name, though his bleary gaze doesn't leave Dean's. "Cas, how do we help? What do you need?"

Castiel makes a horrific rattling sound, and Dean's vision swims for the second that it takes for the noise to end and the irregular gasping to continue.

"He can't breathe; sit him up," Dean orders, his voice sounding alien in his ears. They maneuver the angel with some difficulty, propping head and shoulders a bit with pillows, trying to strike the balance between alleviating the pressure on struggling lungs and keeping the wound elevated enough. Castiel coughs wetly a few times, but quiets a bit, and, thankfully for Dean's blood pressure, which is rollercoastering uncomfortably, he opens his eyes again.

They lock with Dean's.

_Please don't die, please don't fucking die._

It's not very eloquent as a prayer, and Dean doesn't know who he's praying to anyway, but it's all he can coherently think.

Long, blood-stained fingers find his wrist, stroking weakly.

"D-d-ean..."

"Right here, Cas. Can you tell us what you need?" The shaking's slowly subsiding and he's getting cold again. Dean subconsciously wonders if  _he's_  going to survive this.

"Sh-shot."

"You were shot?" Sam asks, a bit too loudly. "By who? Why aren't you healing?"

"C-crowley. Made...bullets...from...angel b-blade."

Dean feels a bit more of the blood drain from his face. Under his hands, he notices that Sam's fingers are cold. Shit.Castiel seems to notice, too, because his free hand levers itself up from the bed and wavers in the air, fingers poised on their unsteady way to Sam's forehead.

"Cas, wha-- No. Hell no. I'm  _fine_ , Cas. Don't you dare."

But Sam does sound hoarse and wavery; the adrenaline wearing thin. Dean's jaw ratchets tight. This is turning into a complete shit show.

"Sam. Go sit down."

That robot commander voice again. He can feel Sam stare at him, but his brother doesn't say anything, only slowly withdraws his hands from Castiel's wound as Dean pushes down harder. Silent and momentarily obedient. God, Dean's face must really be something right now. "We'll trade off," he amends. Still doesn't break his staredown with Cas.  _Most of you are part angel._  Heal, then, damn you. Heal.

 

Dean loses track of time. It's a bit delayed, that reaction, but it happens now, that space between each and every breath that seems to take hours. Like in the movies where they cut to the clock, second hand slowing down and down, each tick echoing ever louder.

He's just staring into the blood-smeared face of his best friend, stuck between one action and the next, watching a tiny bubble of blood in the corner of Castiel's mouth, and it's so freakin' stupid, so  _insane_ , because who would've thought that the awesome creature who'd smiled when Dean  _stabbed him in the heart_  in some drafty barn a million years ago would be gurgling in his own (his vessel's own) blood, slender feverish belly trembling and bleeding under Dean's hands? That that thing whose wings (and not even his true wings) spanned the width of the barn ceiling would be dying in a shitty motel in the dark in the middle of the Colorado back country? And that Dean - give-em-hell-attitude Dean, who said "fuck you" to _archangels_  and the entire Apocalypse - would just be watching, totally helpless, trying to tether a being the size of a skyscraper to the mortal coil with nothing but gore-slicked hands and unheard prayers?

Prayers.

"Sam. Metatron. Do you think -"

"Trying," Sam grunts, and Dean flicks a glance to him long enough to see that he is - his face ashen and eyes screwed shut as he tries with all his might to get the Voice of God on the psychic phone. Blue light pulses under Dean's fingers like lightning jumping through Cas' veins. They don't have  _time._

Millions and millions of years, and it all comes down to minutes and that thundering second hand. Dean feels like his skull's been ripped open today, and someone's shoved whole histories inside of it, like he's finally started to read the prologue that makes the whole series make sense, and now there's no damn time. And Cas, he seems to sense it too. He struggles to sit up straighter, despite Dean's alarmed hushing, and his eyes open a bit wider, fighting to finalize that connection he always seemed to be trying to make when he stared at Dean like that - like he's trying to beam some kind of vital angelic knowledge into Dean's head.

"Shhh," Dean says automatically, trying to breathe in terror and breathe out calm, that soft careful tone he used to use with Sam when Sam was sick or scared as a kid. "It's gonna be okay, shhh."

His face still feels numb but his eyes grow hot, and distantly, he feels the tears burning down his cheeks. Dammit. Really, really not the time. He feels so  _stupid_ , staring into Cas' face, a face that's become familiar, almost mundane, but at the same time, forever beyond his understanding. The way Castiel moves it, inhabits it. All those histories that Dean could never read, right there in his eyes. Trying to tell him.

_The first sin of the angels._

_He was lost._

~

Metatron made tea for the exhausted prophet and his two exhausted protectors. Dean really didn't give a shit about tea, but he found himself accepting it anyway, feeling like he was just desperately trying to keep up with the script, at this point.

"So wait..." Sam was catching up, too, flopped in an overstuffed armchair and clutching his mug in front of his face with both hands. " _Humans_  become  _angels_?"

"Not as a rule," Metatron said mildly. He sipped his tea and Dean sort of wanted to scream, because something huge and horrible and world-changing was trying to be born in his brain. "It's only happened twice."

"Twice?" Kevin was staring up at him with an awkward mixture of complete awe and profound disappointment.

But Metatron just shrugged again. "Like I said, we're not so different. And then again, we're completely different. But not in the ways that really matter, I guess."

"Tell that to the dicks who tried to start the Apocalypse!" Sam snapped.

Metatron slowly gave him a look that was part fond parent, part stern schoolmaster. Sam closed his mouth and got a bit flushed in the face.

"That's the thing," the Voice of God said softly. "Everyone's always lookng somewhere else for the big problem of Evil. Not," he nodded at Dean, "that evil isn't real. Of course it is. Demons. Fallen angels. The main difference, though, isn't the scale of evil. It's just the power behind it. If Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Custer or Jackson, had had the power of Heaven and Hell to throw around? This world would look a lot different. A lot worse even than it does."

Kevin swirled his tea and his expression changed to something more thoughtful, more troubled.

"But," he began, hesitantly. "If demons can be cured, and angels can sin, what...what exactly are we fighting for?"

And Metatron, who had once been Enoch, just some dude picked up by God and thrust into the theater of heavenly conflict, looked down at the prophet and smiled one of the saddest smiles Dean had ever seen.

~

_"You must go into Hell," they tell him. "You must raise the Righteous Man."_

_It's all very formal in the council meeting, of course. The scribes hand down the orders from on High with all of the glory and pomp associated with Heavenly hierarchy. It's a bit of a different story when it comes down to the actual tactical planning._

_"We have seven potential targets," Tariel tells them, "so seven garrisons will descend into the Pit. We don't have a lot of intelligence on exactly where the Righteous Men are being kept, so you'll want to encamp in one of the outer rings and send your best scouts. When the most viable target has been located, we will amass and make a concerted attack."_

_The angel Castiel, first of the lower order within his garrison, beneath the command of Hayyel, listens with dutiful attentiveness._

_"You will be the scout for our garrison," Hayyel tells Castiel. "You're quick and clever, and a formidable fighter."_

_Hayyel is a kind and capable leader, a bit cool and distant in the way most angels are, but Castiel allows himself for just a moment to feel regret that Anael and Balthazar are not with them. He has not seen either of them in a long time - he fears that Balthazar was killed in the war with Lucifer. No one has told him otherwise, anyway. And Anael...he feels a kind of sadness for the absence of Anael. She was quick and strong, and she smiled a lot. But ever since the fall of Lucifer, she began to seem faint, as though he were seeing her from a great distance. Then, one day she simply disappeared. He doesn't understand._

_But the mission, he does understand._

_At least, until they breach the third ring of Hell, and everything, as he will later learn the saying goes, goes to shit._

_The Dukes of Hell are some of the First Fallen, and they are strong. Though the demons in the first few rings have never seen an angel before, and mostly flee in terror, the Fallen know exactly what to expect of their brethren, and the fight becomes fierce, personal, and chaotic._

_Black and red bands of lightning split the iron skies of Hell as Castiel dives, wings tucked like jets of blue flame, straight into the deepest part of the Pit, hoping to use his speed to lose the Fallen that bellows blackly on his tail. The acrid atmosphere of the Pit half-blinds him; he doesn't know where the rest of his garrison is. He knows that Jegudiel and Abraz are dead. His own wings are tattered where a mutant hellhound tore at them. Before him, somewhere in the steaming bowels of Hell, he can see the lights of two souls - two of the Righteous, accessible within a few days' journey, at last._

_One shines gleaming in a cavern on a mountaintop, closer than the other, and more easily reached. Before the garrison was split up by the fighting, Hayyel told him that this soul was his target. Get in, get out. Then the huge serpent had exploded up out of the haze between them and Castiel was thrown blindly into chaos._

_Why he does not aim for the soul on the mountaintop, Castiel will never be able to say. The next nearest target is much further, and is sequestered in a great crater, lined at the top with towering spikes. It is not as bright as the other, but instead is dimmed by the grime of sin and loathing. But like colored glass underwater, the brief glitter of it, infrequent and barely discernible from this distance, catches him, tugs at something in him like a stone caught in a gear, and with barely another thought he veers in his course, disobeying._

~

Dean feels like the remainder of his life is being counted in Castiel's ragged, gurgling breaths. At least they've gotten a bit more regular now, but the angel's face is almost grey with pain and blood loss, and well,  _grace loss_ , Dean guesses. He's bound the gauze tight against Cas' wound with bandages, after the ordeal of lifting his lower back to check for an exit wound. There was none, so Dean bound him up as tight as he could. Castiel's body was sweaty and hot, and Dean was surprised somehow at how human he felt, all the heavy muscles, the blood and sweat-slick skin.

Dean is currently swearing, breathlessly and inventively, at the non-present Metatron, whose attention Sam has failed to get.

"What do we do?"

Sam is slumped in a chair by Castiel's bedside, looking a little like he's been shot in the gut himself - eyes sunken and red-rimmed with exhaustion, face rivaling Cas' for most paste-like color. But he looks to Dean, helpless, young, like a kid whose puppy has been hit by a car.

Dean is pretty sure that behind his own clenched teeth, his whole being is screaming.

"I don't  _know!_ "

Every word he's ever heard regarding angels - everything Cas has told him, everything Uriel and Gabriel and Zachariah and Anna said, everything he's dug up or researched during these last four years of cataclysmic End-Times funhouse bullshit - is all spinning through Dean's head at once, clicking by on the slide show screen of his mind, as he desperately casts about for anything that can save Cas. It's starting to make him dizzy and light-headed.  
He breathes in, timing his inhale with Castiel's rough gasp.

He thinks of the impossible story that Metatron told him.  _Angels watching over you._  Could any of them have known how true - how terribly true - that was? And Cas.  _Gripped you tight and raised you from Perdition._  His upper arm hasn't borne that handprint for a couple of years now, but if he thinks about it, Dean can still feel it, like some weird promise without words, some label branded into his skin.  _Part angel._

Maybe that's why the souls were in such high demand during Cas and Raphael's big heavenly pissing contest. Souls like grace, cut from almost the same cloth...and hell, didn't that mean that Dean's was part  _Castiel_ , since Cas had put him back together after the Pit?  
He raises his head from his hands.

"Cas!"

The angel's head lolls on the pillow, weak but just barely conscious, towards the sound of Dean's voice. Dean stands up, jerked like a puppet on a string, and moves to crouch over Cas' prone form. "Cas! Remember...remember when you were hurt before...when we were hunting the Phoenix, back in the Old West? You touched Bobby's soul, to heal yourself! You said...you told me that souls were like power, to the angels, remember? Cas?" He lifts the hem of his t-shirt. "Cas, you gotta touch my soul, you gotta do it _now!_ "

In the chair, Sam, almost comatose, lifts his head a bit.

"Dean..." His eyes try to open a bit wider. "Do you...d'you think it'll work?"

" _No._ "

Both of their heads jerk in unison to stare at Cas, who is fighting to sit up. His chest, bare beneath the ruins of his dress shirt, spasms with another shuddering breath.

"What?"

"I...D-dean...no. Too...it's too..."

"Cas, so help me, if you say it's too dangerous, I'm gonna knock your block off!"

Castiel's brows furrow, whether in confusion over the phrase or agonizing pain, Dean can't tell.

"But it is. It...Dean...could....kill...kill all three of us...the...explosion..."

Dean stares at him - the planes of his pale face gleaming with sweat in the dim motel light, the hollows around his eyes deep and dark. He looks terrible; he looks human. Until blue light flickers between his clenched teeth.

"Sam. Leave the room. Now."

Sam's halfway out of his chair. " _What?_ "

Dean doesn't look up at him; can't let his eyes leave the drama of Castiel's bloody struggles for breath. No time.

"Sam, you have to do the third trial. You hear me? You have to do it. If this kills us, or if it kills me, you gotta close the gates of Hell. Because even if everything Metatron says is right...if angels and demons are...are part of us? Or if we're part of them...? Then you remember what he said we were fighting for. And if that's true, that's enough. To stop Crowley, to keep him from just doing whatever the hell he wants with us. From taking that away from us. Okay?"

Sam's quiet long enough that Dean almost breaks his gaze to see if he's still conscious, but then a hand descends on his shoulder, hesitant at first, then firm, squeezing.

"Okay."

Sam puts his other hand down on Castiel's shoulder, first so gently, then suddenly gripping Cas' dirty suit jacket with white knuckles. Dean feels his eyes sting again.

"I - "

Sam begins, but can't finish. Dean knows, anyway, and he just hopes that Cas does, too. The angel can barely lift his eyelids to look up at Sam, but his fingers twitch by his side.  
Dean waits for the sound of the door closing before he lets the tears fall.

"So now ya got no excuse." He tells Cas, voice ragged. "Sam's gonna finish the trials, with or without us. So this soul-groping could nuke us both? Fine. Then we both go together."

~

**And after that I saw all the secrets of the heavens, and how the kingdom is divided, and how the actions of men are weighed in the balance.**

**And my face was changed, for I could no longer behold.  
(The Book of Enoch)**

~

"Just the same thing anyone's ever fought for." Metatron told Kevin, Dean, and Sam. He set his teacup down on a tower of books and stroked the spines idly as though reading them with his fingers. He gave another one of those meek shrugs, looking like a man who'd surrendered to an enormity he had no control over, ages ago.

"The chance to live for one more day. To self-determine."

Sam squinted dangerously at the angel, and Dean could feel that anger building up from across the room.  _That's it? That's your glib fucking answer? To why I'm risking everything?_

"Free will," murmured Kevin, staring soulfully into his mug, like he had been thinking the same thing, but with a totally different emotion.

"Yes. When it comes down to it, that's all you've got."

Dean scrubbed his face roughly with both hands, feeling like he just wanted to sleep for a week. But underneath that, the weird, huge feeling lurked still, an electric storm over the horizon. His stomach buzzed with it. Or maybe that was just the tea.

"And what about the angels?" Sam asked hoarsely. "If we close the Gates of Hell, we get rid of Crowley and the demons, but what about Heaven? Do you think they'll just button up and go home once Hell is out of the picture?"

Metatron raised both eyebrows briefly.

"To be perfectly honest? No. With God out of the picture, the angels are just as lost as you are. Think about it. Humanity was created to have free will. To follow its own path, whether it was to glory...or ruin. You've had millenia of existence to figure out what it means to be able to do that. And even you haven't figured it out, have you? People still desperately cling to all sorts of authority figures. God. Presidents. Parents. Shamans. Priests. But the angels...all that power, and no free will. It had to be ordered, hierarchical, or else you lot wouldn't have had a chance. And then the Watchers fell. So enamored of you in your imperfection, your struggle. The small, but brilliant lights of your souls. Who _wouldn't_ want to know that better? To taste what angels never could - freedom?"

The solitary little apartment was quiet and dusty, like Dean always imagined a professor's study would be, on those rare occasions when he tried to envision Sam's sojourn at Harvard. It was almost like they were talking about something pretend - something that couldn't touch anyone here, had nothing to do with any of them. Metatron's voice was mild and soft, and Dean wanted to scoff at him, this wingless dick and his so-called heavenly wisdom, but for some reason, Metatron's words didn't just flow over him, but stabbed through his brittle armor, finding claw-holds in his head and digging in.

"And now, with war, and upheaval, and murder, and loss...with Michael in the Cage with Lucifer - those two, whom so many angels always saw as opposite poles of their universe - now, there are certainly some, if not most, of the heavenly host who would do anything to return order to their world. Even if it meant imposing false order on yours."

Kevin, who had been almost sullenly silent, grimaced.

"Like those fundamentalist Christians believe already exists..."

Metatron nodded, slowly. "I suspect even  _they_  would be surprised at what angels would wreak. But yeah. I can only imagine that the angels would try to create an Eden of Earth. And of course, there would go the neighborhood."

Sam was staring off into the stacks of books, past Dean, probably past anything that the rest of them could see. Poor Sam and his dreams of being Sir Galahad. Dean's stomach twisted at the memory he couldn't remember.

"So...with Crowley and the demons out of the way, there's nothing to stop the angels." Sam muttered, weakly.

Metatron pursed his lips and remained silent.

"No."

Dean surprised himself, probably all of them, with the firmness of his voice, though it sounded like he hadn't spoken for a week, all gravelly and raw.

"Not nothing. We've got Cas." And that big, scary truth rumbled and shifted inside of him again, gleaming briefly in the dark, but didn't show itself.

~

_"You must never go near the Cage of the Watchers, Castiel." They told him. "Their songs are poisonous and their truths blasphemy."_

_Castiel was young when the Watchers fell. He had been exercising his wings among the nearer stars, careening enthusiastically through the vacuum of space and delighting in chasing comets. So he had not been present when Semjaza, Azazel, Ramiel, and the others stepped from Heaven and approached the human souls living on the edges of the deserts and mountains. He had not witnessed - nor had any angel, except for perhaps a few of the oldest and most silent - the gentle touch of grace to soul, the tender mingling of spirit and then, finally, flesh._

_He had been called back from his youthful play to take part in the Great Punishment. He had fought alongside Anael and Uriel, under the command of Zachariah, in Lucifer's own garrison. He had found himself face to face with Semjaza, one of the Watchers, one of the Fallen. He remembered being alarmed at the humanity of Semjaza's chosen face._

_"Brother, little brother," Semjaza had said, softly. "Don't do this."_

_"Take him, Castiel!" Zachariah had snapped, but Castiel hesitated._

_"Why?" He asked Semjaza._

_The older angel, whose vessel wore greying hair and dark, fatherly eyes, said, "Someday you will understand."_

_Then Anael and Turiel had grabbed Semjaza and brought him before Lucifer, who, in blazing glory, forced him along with the others into the abyss below Heaven, where fire belched endlessly and along whose edges human souls, troubled and hateful in death, already wandered._

_And Enoch, the Metatron, told them that this place was now called Hell, and all angels were forbidden to go there._

_But before Hell was separated by several veils of existence and the demilitarized zone known as Purgatory, Castiel often wandered close, when he tired of the stars, halfway hoping to catch sight of the Fallen, imagining that if he could, he would ask Semjaza, who had always been so great and beautiful, what he had seen in a human soul that so tempted him to fall._

~

Dean holds up the hem of his t-shirt, baring his belly for Castiel's hand. Sweat drips down the small of his back, though the room isn't all that warm. He wonders what it will feel like - he knows it'll hurt, because he's seen Cas go fist-deep inside Sam and that kid, before, and it sure didn't seem like a party.

But Cas is still hesitating, wasting time and consciousness. His fingers are stretched halfway to Dean's skin, wavering above the bed covers, and there's a look of heartbreak on his face.

"What, Cas? Dammit,  _what?_  Just do it!" Tears are tickling the hot skin of his face, and he doesn't even care. The clock ticks away another second, two, five, hollow and deathly. Soon Cas won't be awake enough to do it at all; soon, all that's left of him will be an empty vessel and the huge ashen imprints of wings, reminding Dean that something holy and irreplaceable is gone, forever. Dean can't really think ahead to that moment, because that moment is when all thoughts end. It makes his throat close up. It makes him want to slap the shit out of Cas, right now.

"Do it."

He tries to use the scary-robot-commander voice from earlier, but what comes out is completely the opposite - a trembling, destroyed sound that's far more begging than commanding. It rips up from some tight and quickly-crumbling place in Dean's chest, and it finally makes Castiel's eyes open, their deep blue ringed with light, and fix on Dean's face.

Castiel's bloody fingers touch the skin of Dean's stomach, and for a terrifying second, Dean thinks that it's too late, that Cas is too weak. That soft, cool, and desperate touch is all he'll ever have.

Then, slowly, Cas' fingertips push, firm to bruising to unpleasantly  _stabbing,_ and the pain starts.

Dean tries to take deep breaths. He's undergone some serious stabbings and clawings and flayings before, but that doesn't make it any easier. Cas' hand becomes a blade, a sword of fire slowly piercing his belly, relentlessly parting his muscles, and bones and organs, splitting fat and flesh and still going, past his increasingly wrecked attempts to breathe and on into something that's neither bone nor flesh, something that tears Dean in two and makes the pain of being speared alive seem like puppies and ice cream by comparison.

He is only aware of the sudden and stark reality of being made of billions of atoms, and each atom is burning to a crisp, blowing up like a billion little Hindenburgs all on fire, floating away from each other, the electrical fields between them tearing like thin, soft skin. He wants to scream,  _stop, wait! It's too much!_  There is no voice to scream with, and no lungs, and no air, and no diaphragm, and soon, as the atoms all burst and burn, one by one, no brain to cradle the thought. There is a sound - something so enormous he can barely understand it as sound, at first. Like a thousand-voiced choir in a thunderstorm. The remaining atoms of his mind tremble with the force of it, and slowly, they realize that it is a voice. _I'm sorry, Dean._  He registers one last instant of panic, and then Dean is gone.

In his place is a rushing void that senses itself. It knows itself to be wider and deeper than seven solar systems, a cavern into which all light falls. It exists in all time and space, and yet, energy and light and matter are always streaming into the great dark gash of it at roaring speeds. They plunge into the eternal black and cold like debris over a thundering waterfall, yet it never fills. It is a gaping emptiness cut into the fabric of the universe, and if it had a voice, it would scream with hunger and despair. For millions of miles down it is nothing but darkness, until at the bottom, after five hundred years of falling, some of that hapless matter lands amid churning, howling fire. The fire devours the emptiness, eats holes into it, and in these holes something shines, brighter than stars and yet dwarfed by the blackness all around.

This is Hell.

In a chasm made of iron molecules that have collected here over billions of years, a man is strapped to a rack. His throat flaps uselessly as he tries to scream for help in the vacuum, and no one hears him.

The man is one of millions upon millions of creatures, stuck in the fabric of Hell like flies in a cosmic spider web. The void is made of their pain, and it screeches and tears itself, wider and deeper, one foot per year into the material of spacetime, as though it could tunnel right out of the universe someday, bringing all of the damned with it. One foot per year, and when it reaches a thousand trillion miles deep and wide, all existence will end, and all torment will be over. The fires shriek and devour, and still nothing is taken away.

The shining ones shudder in their chains, clinging to the edges of the black holes that imprison them, torn by cosmic winds that scream like a hundred thousand tornadoes, ripping the light from them, tearing at their trembling wings. Still they remain beautiful. Their tears flow like ice into the lava fires of Hell, cooling them one tenth of one degree for every ten million tears. Above the howling of the inferno, sometimes the damned can hear their songs.

It is a symphony played on instruments of glass, more beautiful and more sorrowful than all of the dirges mankind has ever written. It rises from the abyss like the songs of birds returning after great destruction - first one, lonely, high, ascending in a spiral of longing and solitude; then others, two and three and a hundred and a hundred thousand, weaving a melody that would break human ears and hearts if it could be heard. The harmonics shake the iron walls of Hell, so that once every two thousand years, a single pebble falls from the foundation that is millions of miles wide and deep. It is the song of stars cast from their sockets in the heavens to languish in the dark and cold. It is the song of a loneliness more profound than any human isolation. The song of love torn from love, completely and forever.

The song is just a background vibration in the pulsing gyre of Hell when it reaches the man on the rack, but the thing in him that was once human remembers - that it is the frequency of his cells renewing themselves every seven years, of the tides of the ocean that bore all life, the rhythm of his mother's womb. A heart that has been cut from his chest and hung on a meat hook above him aches with longing, and ocean tears fall from his bleeding eyes.

Across the immeasurable skyscape of Hell, something huge and bright changes its course and veers toward him with purpose.

~

_Castiel imagines. It's not something he ever used to do. As an angel, he is able to see a vast portion of existence, and therefore generally doesn't need to imagine._

 _That was when he was certain. When he had pulled the Righteous Man (well,_ a _Righteous Man, and that's what mattered) out of Perdition, and everything was on track. The Righteous Man would ascend to untold glory as the vessel of the Archangel Michael, and Lucifer would be defeated again, as was foretold. Supposedly._

_But the Righteous Man didn't want to be Michael's vessel, and his brother didn't want to be Lucifer's, and even though Castiel's mission was to guide them in their paths, he found himself sympathizing. He found himself remembering, with discomfort, that old feeling that something wasn't right. That the translation was a bit off - that the system was running away with itself. If he'd known then of the human game of "telephone," he might have made the comparison._

_And now, as he sits with the jar of blood in his hand, ready to swallow all the souls of Purgatory (a thought that makes him feel a little queasy, to be perfectly honest) in order to defeat Raphael, he allows himself the indulgence of imagination._

_In his mind, he travels to the edge of the Cage of the Fallen. Though many of the Fallen were twisted to darkness over time, becoming part of Hell itself, there are a few who remain. Semjaza is one of those._

_In his mind, Castiel approaches the Fallen One without fear. They sit near to each other, separated only by the forcefield that makes the Cage a cage. Castiel is rumpled and weary; Semjaza is fatherly and sad. Castiel asks, "Why did you do it?"_

_And Semjaza says, "I saw a soul who was beautiful, who was troubled, who was strong. And as I watched that soul struggle, I felt that she needed me. And more than that, I needed her. I saw humans capable of harming each other horribly, and capable of comforting each other in ways that angels could not experience. And I felt that I understood them. I, too, felt lonely among the stars sometimes, but who to talk to about that? We are not created to feel lonely, or tired, or afraid, or uncertain. But we are alive, and the Universe is alive, and so we do feel those things. And I thought I would say to that soul, you and I are alone in the universe, as are all beings. None help you, but I will help you. None take care of you, but I will take care of you. And you will teach me what it's like to be looked upon in love."_

~

_"You know why I don't believe in angels, Sam? Or God or anything like that?"_

_"Why?"_

_"Because of shit like this. Because bad shit keeps happening to good people, and it just don't ever stop. Where's a God who gives a shit about kids and innocent people getting torn to shreds? Where's this kid's guardian angel?"_

_"Yeah, but I -"_

_"What?"_

_"I don't think that it's supposed to be that way. You know? How would that be fair, if everyone always had a personal guardian always making sure they do the right thing and don't get hurt? Or if some people did, but others didn't? People die, Dean. It's what happens. It doesn't mean that there's nothing out there watching...it just means that it can't interfere in people's lives all the time."_

_"Well then, what's the point?"_

_"I dunno. I really don't. Maybe the point is we're supposed to figure it out ourselves. In a way, we let evil into the world, we gotta kick it back out. You know, if you believe that."_

_"Yeah, well. I don't."_

_"Sure. Right."_

_"What?"_

_"Nothing. Just...why would you believe that there was only bad stuff - demons, wights, ghouls, vampires - and not believe there was anything good, somewhere out there, too?"_

_"I think we're back to Point A, Sammy."_

_"Maybe. But just because we haven't personally run into anything like that, doesn't mean it doesn't exist somewhere."_

_"What, angels?"_

_"Sure."_

~

Sound returns. Light returns. Mass and matter and weight return with the suddenness of a two-ton anvil falling off a truck bed, only to be immediately assaulted by something too loud, too bright, too fast and powerful to comprehend. The soul knows itself - it knows the pain of having a self. It knows itself mired in a darkness that doesn't only come from Hell. It knows itself to be small, weak, helpless, angry. The newly regenerated atoms of the brain begin to expand with that oncoming brightness, as though entire suns were being born in each one. But this time, it's not like exploding. It's like transforming.

Rivers of light describe the veins of an arm, reaching. A star sits in the chest, spinning with a sound like oceans breathing. It is the color of sun on water. Four faces gaze into one face, eight eyes wide with impossible tenderness, radiating with a ferocity and love more terrifying than Hell. Two eyes return the gaze, the sea rising in them as each cell is scoured clean in the light of the radiant intelligence that has come to save him. He thinks he will dissolve in that ocean of light, and his heart swells in his chest.  _Do it. Please._

__

 

But no.

There is a tear in the fabric, a wet red gap in the shining corona. Darkness closes on the great wings, hands of chaos tearing the pinions out, one by one. His savior cries in pain, beginning to dissolve right in front of him, and the soul knows panic, a fear deeper than anything driven by survival.

_No._

A brand flares upon his arm. There is blood on his palm.

He slams his hand against the closing door of the angel's heart.

Thunder rolls up from the bottom of Hell, from the spaces between stars that humankind hasn't seen. The center goes supernova; everything is obliterated. A fast-disintegrating waveform, chased by its own ending, an ourobouros of mathematics, describes the arch of a human throat, the tender joining of flesh and open jaw, head tilted and mouth open to inhale the evaporation of space and time as though it were oxygen. The pounding flap of two great wings, alight with the glitter of starbirth, stretched in ecstasy, welcoming in the pulse of life. Hell transforms around them. Hell was the song of emptiness, and now nothing is empty; the universe filled with light and being.

Memory comes rushing back, and with it, pain unimaginable. The heart seizes in sorrow. The angel presses his lips there, and even sorrow becomes holy.

_And I shall create a new heaven and a new earth_

says the voice from beyond the void.

_And everything that has gone before will not come to mind._

The throat remembers air, how to gasp, how to breathe a name in reverence. The soul remembers being filled, how two become one, for a single, nuclear moment.

_I was dirty and you made me clean_  
  
(Set me as a seal upon your heart)

_I was sick and you healed me_

(As a seal upon your arm)

Together, they are something new. If the heavens howl at their blasphemy, if Hell rejoices, they don't hear or care. For one moment, heaven and earth are burned away, and what stretches for eternity before them is nothing either of them has seen before, yet somehow, blissfully familiar.

For the angel, it is a crystal path, winding up impossible peaks near a vast ocean - a pathway leading to the stars where he used to play in his youth. It is the tiny warmth of a human soul, tucked close, eyes wide in wonder at the glory of the galaxy that he will show to him.

For the human soul, it is the rumble of a big, old car and a road that curves away over a sunlit world. It is Zeppelin on the radio and a little brother tunelessly singing along in the passenger seat. It is a third presence, sitting in the back, scowling at the radio as though he could force it to make sense.

It hovers a moment in the space where muscles and joints collide, an elbow digging sharply into a soft flank, a knee bruising a hip. A mouth hovering wetly over a blood-smeared chest, panting gusts of hot air as the brain slows its painful careening around the inside of a skull. A smooth belly rising and falling gently and evenly, as though the body had never gasped in pain at all. Around this, the bright world retreats, slow as a tide, leaving jumbled bits in its wake - a star split into seven pieces, a face as bright as ten suns, the low, eternal resonance that creates the universe.

Castiel's fingers are still poking into Dean's belly, and Dean blinks several times before he remembers who he is and where that nagging sense of discomfort is coming from.

"Ow," he mumbles, and tries to sit up. He's locked between Cas' legs, body prone on top of Cas' body, his hand pressing bloodlessly against Castiel's chest. His arm is completely numb, and he's pretty sure he drooled all over the angel. Did he have a seizure? He blinks down at Castiel, who looks back with eyes deep and languid. Somewhere in the core of them Dean sees stars, and he realizes that his face is wet with tears.

"Cas, I -"

But he can't; it's still too enormous. Instead, he runs a hand down Cas' belly, feeling the edges of a scar and the dried tracks of blood. Castiel returns the touch, fingertips now feather-light, and Dean trembles. His head feels vast and light with memories. There is a fading ringing in his ears. Castiel brushes his hand across Dean's forehead, the rough rasp of palm cool and comforting on his skin. Dean leans into it, eyes closed, his nerves still singing like plucked guitar strings. When a softly chapped mouth finds his, he opens to it without hesitation.

_for it burns like a blazing fire, a mighty flame_

Castiel, warm, solid, living, shifts beneath him with movements that echo something massive and wild. If Dean doesn't open his eyes, he can see giant wings stretching through the walls of the slightly claustrophobic motel room, and a heart like a miniature sun. He grips Castiel's now-uninjured flank with iron fingers until he hears a slight grunt of breath. Dean lets his weight sink down, as though he were just now finally regaining his full solidity, and beneath him, the angel trembles.

 

_Thy Kingdom come._

~

The Ute tribe of southwestern Colorado, who for ages have been stewards of the land where one day Dean and Sam would stand with the prophet Kevin and speak with the Scribe of God, naturally have their own stories about the beginning.

Pokoh, Old Man, created the world, they say. He created every tribe out of the soil where they used to live. Pokoh did not wish for men to wander and travel, but to remain in their birthplace. But when mankind was born and grew up, Pokoh, like all fathers, no longer had control over what they did. Humans had to make their journeys on their own, but the spirits sometimes helped and guided them, and sometimes confused and misled them. Sometimes, a human girl or boy would fall in love with one of the Sky People, like when Feather-Woman fell in love with Morning Star, and they had a son, Star Boy, who brought great knowledge and fortune to his people.

The Ute also know that there are many worlds. Some have passed and some are yet to come. In one world, humans all creep on the ground; in another, they all walk. Perhaps in some world to come, they may walk on four legs, or crawl on their bellies like snakes, or perhaps, they will learn to fly through the air themselves, like birds.

~


End file.
